"Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity."

"I always thought old age would be a writer's best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory's gone, all the old fluency's disappeared. I don't write a single sentence without saying to myself, 'It's a lie!' So I know I was right. It's the best chance I've ever had."

"Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."

"But it is only since I have ceased to live that I think of these things and the other things. It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life, and that I judge it, as it is said that God will judge me, and with no less impertinence. To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don't torment me, but one sometimes forgets."

"Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle."

"There's never an end for the sea."

"The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness."

"The more people I meet the happier I become."

"My mother. I don't think too harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate sewers."

"She began stroking my ankles. I considered kicking her in the cunt."

"He sometimes halted without saying anything. Either he had finally nothing to say or while having something to say he finally decided not to say it."

"When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckettas told by Bill Moyer in the Foreword he wrote for, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson. Afterword by Ann Patchett."

"In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?"

"I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them."

"The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day."

"There he is then, the unfortunate brute, quite miserable because of me, for whom there is nothing to be done, and he so anxious to help, so used to giving orders and to being obeyed. There he is, ever since I came into the world, possibly at his instigation, I wouldn't put it past him, commanding me to be well, you know, in every way, no complaints at all, with as much success as if he were shouting at a lump of inanimate matter."

"James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can."

"And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another."

"But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head."

"The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh."

"Seen no matter how and said as seen. Dread of black. Of white. Of void. Let her vanish. And the rest. For good."

"Dying for dark - the darker the worse. Strange."

"We always find something, eh Didi, to let us think we exist?"

"One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second."

"There's my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don't say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough."

"When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line."

"It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible."

"All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead."

"What is certain is this, that I never rested in that way again, my feet obscenely resting on the earth, my arms on the handlebars and on my arms my head, rocking and abandoned. It is indeed a delporable sight, a deplorable example, for the people, who so need to be encouraged, in their bitter toil, and to have before their eyes manifestations of strength only, of courage and joy, without which they might collapse, at the end of the day, and roll on the ground."